On Fri, Jul 20, 2001 at 01:37:43PM -0500, Simeon Johnston wrote: > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/07/20/1228200&mode=nocomment > > Alan Cox resigns from Usenix. > > http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=593 > > Dmitry Sklyarov arrested for violating the DMCA. What's the DMCA? > > Sorry, I don't understand much of this.... But WTF, DMCA: Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 1998 law which essentially banned reverse-engineering of encryption code, regardless of the purpose. Criminal penalties under DMCA were not enacted until last October. Dmitry Sklyarov: Russian software engineer who gave a talk at DefCon last weekend on the topic of security in Adobe's eBook products. Or, rather, the lack of security. (Some books were "encrypted" with ROT13...) Adobe didn't like this, so they told the FBI that he was disseminating information on how to circumvent encryption used to control access to a copyrighted work, which is illegal under the DMCA. On Monday morning, while preparing to return home to Russia, FBI agents arrested Dmitry in his hotel room. He is currently being held in Las Vegas without bail and will be taken to San Jose for a preliminary hearing, most likely within the next day or so. If convicted, he faces penalties up to 5 years in prison and/or a $500,000 fine. Of particular note is that the reverse engineering was done and the decryption software was written in Russia, where it is legal. Not only is Dmitry's work legal there, but Adobe's eBook software is in violation of Russian law as it does not allow the purchaser to make a backup copy. Alan Cox: Linux kernel developer who lives in Britain and is often involved in work on device drivers for proprietary hardware whose specs are not published and, therefore, must be reverse engineered. While I doubt that he is in any immediate danger of a DMCA-related arrest, he's making the point that the U.S. government has demonstrated that it is willing to arrest foreign programmers for writing code in foreign countries if that code can be construed as a violation of the DMCA. -- With the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov it has become apparent that it is not safe for non US software engineers to visit the United States. - Alan Cox